How are "organic" pesticides created

[thorny_locust]

@markn_1

Here’s a Scientific American article on the topic:

Quotes below are from the article cited, except as noted one near the end of the post.
To begin with, they’re wrong on the very first line.

Ten years ago, Certified Organic didn’t exist in the United States.

USDA Certified Organic didn’t go into effect until 2010, true. But I’ve been certified organic since 1988, and some people for longer. Private agencies used to do the job; some of the same ones still do, though they now have to use the USDA standards if they’re going to use the word “organic”. Standards before the USDA got into it were occasionally more lenient on specific items, but often stricter, partly in that many of them covered areas (such as treatment of farmworkers) that the USDA refused to include, and partly in that the USDA is often more lenient in such things as treatment of livestock.

According to the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy, the top two organic fungicides, copper and sulfur, were used at a rate of 4 and 34 pounds per acre in 1971 1. In contrast, the synthetic fungicides only required a rate of 1.6 lbs per acre, less than half the amount of the organic alternatives.

Comparing the intensivity of the use of pesticides in terms of pounds per acre is either silly, or deliberately misleading. Toxicity of entirely different materials can’t fairly be compared purely in terms of their weight; it may take much more weight of one than of another to present a hazard. Also, there’s no mention in the article of frequency of use either in terms of a given season or of use over multiple years (I can’t tell whether the study cited mentions this, as the link leads not to any specific study but only to the home page of NCFAP.)

In addition, copper and sulfur, which the article criticized organic farmers for using as pesticides, are both essential nutrients for crops (and humans), and may be applied as such by either conventional or organic farmers as soil amendments/fertilizers.

https://nrcca.cals.cornell.edu/soilFertilityCA/CA1/CA1_print.html

There is such a thing as copper toxicity; like boron and other micronutrients, while you need it, you don’t need much of it, and too much is indeed a bad idea. That’s why copper is a restricted material in organic use and “must be used in a manner that minimizes accumulation in the soil” if used as a pesticide, and requires soil testing to determine actual deficiency if to be used as a soil amendment.

factory farming is factory farming, whether its organic or conventional.

Wilcox has a point, there. But that issue has more to do with monocropping, selection of varieties for yield and shipping quality rather than flavor and nutrition, treatment of livestock (especially considering the USDA’s unwillingness to enforce the original intention of the standards), and destruction of habitat.

What makes organic farming different, then? It’s not the use of pesticides, it’s the origin of the pesticides used.

It’s also the way the pesticides are used, as I explained in my earlier post in this thread. I won’t go into it again in this one, which is already a very long post.

Take the example of Rotenone.

Rotenone hasn’t been allowed for use in organic production for a number of years now. As the author appears to acknowledge later in the paragraph – but why then bring it up in the first place? Is the implication that organic farmers think all naturally occuring substances are nontoxic? That’s nonsense. We don’t allow lead arsenate, either – and, in fact, because my farm had an orchard back in the 1920’s, I was required (clear back in the 1980’s) to test for lead in the soil before I could become certified organic. There would have been no such requirement for a conventional farmer.

when Consumer Reports purchased a thousand pounds of tomatoes, peaches, green bell peppers, and apples in five cities and tested them for more than 300 synthetic pesticides, they found traces of them in 25% of the organically-labeled foods

The stuff’s in the rain, folks. And they found less of them in the organic than in the conventional.

Here’s Consumer Reports on the subject (the second link’s a pdf):

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health/natural-health/pesticides/index.htm

https://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/cro/news_articles/health/CR_FSASC_FromCroptoTablePesticides_Mar2015.pdf   

The reason for the higher pathogen prevalence is likely due to the use of manure instead of artificial fertilizers, as many pathogens are spread through fecal contamination.

Raw manure is forbidden in organic use within 90 days of harvest of a crop whose edible portion does not contact the soil, and within 120 days of harvest of a crop whose edible portion does contact the soil. Composting standards for organic use require heat sufficient to kill pathogens. The implication that organic growers are dumping raw manure on your lettuce is entirely untrue. Many organic growers don’t even use manure.

The one study cited by the article for an increased level of e coli and salmonella in organic produce uses 32 farms claiming to be organic, only 8 of which were actually certified. There are both good and bad possible reasons for farms who say they’re using organic methods to not be certified; one of the bad reasons is a failure to understand or maintain the standards. All the organic farms chosen for the study did use manure, which strikes me as odd for produce farms, especially if they’re not including dried, pelleted, and heat treated forms; certainly mixed farms that also have livestock may be using manure, but this is also true of conventional farms.

(I note that most E coli are neutral or actively beneficial. Your gut is full of E coli right now. None of the study’s samples, organic or conventional, contained E. coli O158:H7, which is indeed dangerous.)

– ah, here’s an article on that study that gives more detail than the abstract the link went to:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/05/study-yields-mixed-findings-about-microbes-organic-produce

and that article states that the certified organic farms did indeed have less contamination than the non-certified farms claiming organic practices; says that it was the first year of a three-year study, and the second year found no salmonella and still no O157:H7; and quotes the paper as saying

“Based on the absence of E coli O157:H7 and the very low Salmonella prevalence, the assertion that organic produce has greater pathogen contamination does not seem to be supported,”

– there’s a good deal more to the Atlantic article, but that’s all I’ve got time to deal with right now (actually, rather more than I had time to deal with.) Based on the above, though, I’ve got serious doubts about the rest of it.